Fatal Treasure: Greed and Death, Emeralds and Gold, and the Obsessive Search for the Legendary Ghost Galleon Atocha

By Jedwin Smith

"In real life-especially off the Florida coast-things can have fatal consequences. Fatal Treasure is a truly compelling read."
-Aphrodite Jones, New York Times bestselling author of Cruel Sacrifice and All She Wanted

In 1622, hundreds of people lost their lives to the curse of the Spanish galleon Atocha-and they would not be the last. Fatal Treasure combines the rousing adventure of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea with the compelling characters and local color of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It tells the powerful true story of the relentless quest to find the Atocha and reclaim her priceless treasures from the sea. You'll follow Mel Fisher, his family, and their intrepid team of treasure hunters as they dive beneath the treacherous waters of the Florida Straits and scour the ocean floor in search of gold, silver, and emeralds. And you'll discover that nearly four centuries after the shipwreck, the curse of the Atocha is still a deadly force.

"On this day, the sea once again relinquished its hold on the riches and glory of seventeenth-century Spain. And by the grace of God, I would share the moment of glory . . . . I was reaching for my eighth emerald, another big one, when the invisible hands squeezed my trachea. In desperation, I clutched at my throat to pry away the enemy's fingers. But no one had hold of me."
-From the Prologue

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: May 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9780470341087

Book preview

Prologue

I was scuba diving with Donnie Jonas in search of the lost treasure, and as I slipped through the blue-green waves, I felt as if I were being smothered. Panic was immediate. Treasure took a distant second to my discomfort as pressure built up on my eardrums. I must have swallowed my fear because suddenly the pressure was gone. Then I began to struggle with my regulator, which tasted like burned rubber, as I fought to breathe.

The sand bottom came up quickly, materializing out of nowhere. As if caught up in a nightmare, I plummeted, reaching out with both hands to stop my journey. My flippered feet hit bottom, jarring my backbone. My knees buckled from the weight of the compressed-air tank on my back and the weighted belt on my waist. Suddenly I was sitting on a cushion of sand. Instinctively I looked up for help. There, 53 feet up, was the safety of the Magruder, its hull nothing more than a faint shimmering shadow. But the reassuring sight of Jonas, who now flashed a thumbs-up sign of recognition, quelled my claustrophobic terror. No longer afraid, I breathed evenly and slowly. I motioned to Jonas that all was okay. And then, side by side, gliding with the current, we slowly moved toward the tomb of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha.

On this day, the sea once again relinquished its hold on the riches and glory of 17th-century Spain. And by the grace of God, I would share the moment of glory.

Jonas and I moved toward the Atocha’s worm-eaten timbers, which lay at odd angles, poking like prehistoric fingers from beneath the sand. Some jutted upward, others were in a cross-hatch pattern. Here was the final resting place of a great ship and its 260 passengers and crew. Pausing briefly at the side of the tomb, we then swam upward and hovered directly above the timbers. Barracudas and snappers kept us company.

At that moment I could not help but reflect on the tragedy of what transpired 364 years ago. I remember trembling, then dived to the timbers and reverently ran my hands over the worn beams. My fear of the depths of the sea was immediately forgotten as I touched history and was overwhelmed by it.

I have no idea how long I spent peering at the wreck. I remember trying to swallow a lump in my throat and clearing my eyes of tears, then working my way with Jonas to the glistening sand to the right of the timbers. There, suspended inches above the bottom, I began the search. Pebbles and shells came into view, as did a four-foot-long barracuda that hovered inches from my mask. I watched Jonas comb the sands and tried to imitate his search.

Time was forgotten. My fear was replaced by the tranquillity, the deafening silence of a world few have seen. My mind raced with the events of history, and I found peace.

And then the green stones.

Jonas pointed out the first of them—a tiny pebble that glowed green in the white sand. Then another and another. Twenty meters to my left, near the ship’s timbers, Jonas plucked emeralds at a furious rate. To his left, Kim Fisher was doing likewise. Kim was on a roll; five days earlier he’d discovered 40 feet of intricately crafted gold chain, a 10-pound gold disc, and three gold coins near this spot—almost $1 million in New World plunder. And now we’d found emeralds. Handfuls of them.

In the blink of an eye, I acted like a child at an Easter egg hunt—scurrying about, mindless of everything else. I just had to find another emerald. And another and another. This might explain why I had become a writer to begin with, a newspaperman with the bad habit of plunging in headfirst, no matter the consequences.

Now, despite the warning by Mel Fisher and his divers and my respect for the sea, I was consumed by greed. I forgot to check my air gauge; I breathed too deeply and too quickly, until there was nothing left to breathe.

I was reaching for my eighth emerald, another big one, when the invisible hands squeezed my trachea. In desperation, I clutched at my throat to pry away the enemy’s fingers. But no one had hold of me.

Instant panic. Shit, I’m out of air. The surface seemed as if it were a mile away; Jonas and Fisher were shadows in the distance.

I swam to Jonas’s side, tapped him on the shoulder, and then ran my finger in a slicing fashion across my throat. Jonas’s eyes widened; one hand reached for my pressure gauge, which registered empty; the other pressed the mouthpiece of his life-saving regulator to my lips. And then, far too slowly it seemed to me at the time, we cautiously made our way to the surface.

I was lucky. The Atocha is not always so kind.

1

Invitation to the Party

There’s a schooner in the offing, with her topsails shot with fire, and my heart has gone aboard her for the Islands of Desire.

—Richard Hovey

Until May 25, 1985, Mel Fisher was a name I had never heard and Nuestra Señora de Atocha just four more words of Spanish I did not know. But then it started to rain that Saturday afternoon as soon as I made a right-hand turn off Truman Avenue onto Duval Street in Key West, Florida. By the time I had gone two blocks it had become a downpour, and I was lost. My life has not been the same since.

I was a reporter employed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and I had taken the day off from the story I was working on up the road at Sugarloaf Key that would immortalize two Atlanta members of Ducks Unlimited who were making their first venture to fish the Florida flats. It was also my first experience with the Keys and its laid-back lifestyle of wind, water, and seemingly carefree idleness. I was hooked.

For three days we caught tarpon, bonefish, and permit, an extremely flat fish the size of a large frying pan—a fish that looked more like a stone to be skipped across the ocean than something that wore your arms out as you tried to reel it in. Three days of easing through the flats in a shallow-draft skiff watching black-tipped sharks and jacks and manta rays slide beneath the boat. Three days without worry or life’s daily rat race while being fried by an unmerciful sun. I am Irish American, light-skinned and full of freckles, among other things; another hour out on the water and I would have blistered. This was why I decided to play tourist and visit Hemingway House.

But then I got lost in the rain and pulled into the only vacant parking spot I saw. When the sun finally returned, I found myself parked in front of a massive, multistoried stone dwelling adorned with a quaint sign: Mel Fisher’s Treasure Museum. Hemingway House would have to wait.

Long-lost treasure excites me every bit as much as the next person. Maybe me even more, because I am still a child wrapped in an aging man’s body. Years earlier, when my family and I lived on Merritt Island off Florida’s east coast, visiting Disney World was standard fare. Part of the bargain I made with my wife and daughters was a ticket swap: they got my It’s a Small, Small World coupon in exchange for their Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. To me, Disney World was an endless ride on Captain Nemo’s sub. The only thing that would have made the day even brighter would have been the opportunity to slip into the hard-hat suit and walk among the fishes.

That is what was going through my mind when I walked up the concrete steps of Fisher’s museum and paid my three-dollar admission. It entitled me and six other tourists to be ushered into a small room with hard-backed chairs, where we viewed a 54-minute National Geographic documentary, which explained a number of things: who Mel Fisher was, what he did for a living, and why this museum was here.

What kind of man pursues a dream against tremendous odds for over 16 years? What kind of dream is powerful enough to hold someone in its grasp for all those years? asked Martin Sheen, who narrated the video. And then Sheen said: Mel Fisher has been called a hero and a huckster, a visionary and a schemer, an inspiration and a con man.

The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum, which I stumbled into by accident. My life has never been the same.

The National Geographic video explained that Fisher was a former California chicken farmer who got interested in scuba diving during its infancy in the 1950s. One thing led to another, and Mel searched for and discovered Spanish treasure near Florida’s Sebastian Inlet before moving his family to the Keys in 1969 to search for the Atocha and her sister ship Santa Margarita, two of Spain’s most bountiful treasure galleons that sank somewhere near here during a 1622 hurricane. In the ensuing years, Fisher’s divers found the Margarita and its $20 million in gold, but only bits and pieces of the Atocha treasure. Both the state and the federal governments wanted to confiscate all of these riches under the guise of protecting our national heritage.

The video also explained that although the U.S. Supreme Court eventually awarded ownership of the Margarita’s and Atocha’s gold and silver to Fisher, it was a hollow victory because several people had drowned during the search.

It was impossible not to be enthralled by the Fisher saga. Treasure, death, government conspiracy—it was all there.

Yet this was the first that I had ever heard of it. I was enduring Marine Corps boot camp when the Fisher family first arrived in the Keys. I had been covering innocuous National Football League games when Dirk Fisher and the others had drowned in 1975. I had been a war correspondent, trying my best to stay alive while covering the civil unrest in Beirut, Lebanon, just 18 months earlier when Fisher’s divers had made their last big discovery, 23 pieces of ornate gold jewelry found near a place called the Quicksands somewhere out there in the Straits of Florida.

I was kicking myself at the end of the movie, upset that I had missed reporting on the events I had just seen, when we tourists were escorted into an adjoining room. If anyone doubted the veracity of the just-viewed video, the contents of this room made you a believer. Its walls were lined with glass-enclosed cases filled with gold bars, gold rings, gold chains, and silver coins, stunning displays of the Margarita and Atocha treasures. I remember my knees growing weak and finding it difficult to breathe as, almost in a trance, I ambled from one display to another, pulled along by the desire to run my hands over the gold, daydreaming about actually being at the bottom of the sea and helping discover such riches. Then I heard first the soft chuckle and then the words Pretty neat stuff, huh, kid?

Mel Fisher stood before me and I almost swallowed my tongue.

At six-feet-five, he appeared larger than life. He was wearing a gaudy Hawaiian-print blue shirt. A gold doubloon dangled from a thick gold chain around his neck. He draped an arm around my shoulder and said, Have I got a deal for you, kid. With that, he escorted me to a card table where there was a large skillet cake. Fisher pointed to his coin and said that for only $10 I could pick out a slice of cake, which might or might not have a Spanish silver piece of eight inside it. Win or lose, the $10 also entitled me to become a member of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society. The coin alone was worth $600; somewhere in the cake were three of them.

"Tell me which slice you want and I’ll serve it to you myself on this here gold plate that we brought up off the Margarita.C’mon, don’t be shy, Mel said. The odds are in your favor, kid. Hey, today’s the day."

A fool and his money are soon parted. Despite having no desire to become a member of any society, Mel Fisher’s or not, the lure of possibly getting a fabulous return on my money was too much to pass up. And even though the smooth-talking guy looming over me was reminiscent of a carnival barker, I immediately liked him. I identified myself as a newspaperman in search of a good story.

That’s how the adventure began. To use the lexicon of the deep-sea divers I would one day work alongside, I was invited to the party. It was the day before Memorial Day, and Mel Fisher once again was flirting with financial disaster. As was often the case with his operation in the mid-1980s, more money was going out than was coming in. So he had rolled out the cake and its hidden coins under the guise of a Heritage Society membership drive in hopes of defraying some of the back wages he owed his office staff and divers. Mel did not share any of this with me at the time. Instead, he ushered me through a labyrinth of narrow, dark hallways to an immense, dimly lit room, where he introduced Duncan Mathewson, his archaeologist. Mathewson reminded me of a college professor: deeply tanned with wind-blown hair, Clark Kent glasses, and sporting a short salt-and-pepper beard. He was also the first person I had seen wearing slacks in three days. We shook hands and exchanged some rudimentary small talk. Then Mel asked: So what would you like to know?

Mel Fisher smiles as he examines the cache of gold bars, chains, and disks discovered under the sand and silt near the Atocha’s gravesite.

Everything, I replied, which prompted them to laugh.

Mel shook his head and sighed, then lapsed into silence. While he was taking his measure of me, I did likewise of him. Fisher did not fit the image I had envisioned of a treasure hunter. No peg leg like Long John Silver. No cool hat or snappy dialogue like Indiana Jones. Instead, when he spoke, he sounded as if he had just been awakened from a nap—eyes focused on something beyond his reach, mumbling softly or speaking in half-finished sentences and filling in the gaps with the rattle of soft chuckles. A Miami News reporter once described Fisher as looking like your slightly dyspeptic uncle, tall and soft and stoop-shouldered, squinting out from bifocals at a situation not entirely of his own making.

He was a chain smoker and a heavy drinker. He also was usually a man of few words, although that was not the case on this day. Even though he talked at great length, he preferred speaking of his wife and family and his divers, but was embarrassed elaborating about himself. In the following months I would learn that it was not uncommon for him to turn away from a conversation in midsentence and disappear. He was easily bored, even when the subject was treasure.

Finally Mel said, "So you want to know everything, huh? Well, I ain’t got that much time, kid. We’re still looking for her. Been looking for her for 16 years."

I told him that was part of what baffled me. According to the movie I had just seen, it seemed as if he had a fairly good idea of where the Atocha sank. So why was it taking him so long to find her?

You just don’t go out in a rowboat and find something. It’s not like you drop to the bottom and find a treasure chest open here and a cannon over there, Mel said. He paused, obviously measuring my intelligence or lack of it. Noticing my glazed expression, he said, Guess you’ve never been at sea, never done any diving, right?

I told him I had done neither. Mel responded with a tight smile, then spread a huge chart on the table and pointed to thousands of little red-inked circles that had been added to the chart. The red circles represented anomalies, anything different from the bottom’s natural structure, he said, then went into great detail about the nuts and bolts of conducting a treasure hunt at sea. Over the past 16 years, Fisher’s search boats had dragged a magnetometer behind their boats, running prearranged courses back and forth across the Straits of Florida—east to west, from the Marquesas Keys to Rebecca Shoal; north to south, from New Ground Reef to Cosgrove Shoal. By his own estimates, his crews had magged close to 140,000 linear miles of ocean by 1971 alone. A magnetometer, Mel explained, made it easier to detect ferrous metals at the bottom of the sea. When the mag recorded a hit—a metal reading on the ocean bottom—it was duly marked on the chart; hence the red-inked circles I was looking at. Sounds simple enough, he said, except that virtually the entire area he and his crews had been searching used to be a World War II naval air corps bombing range.

"So, sure, we know the Atocha went down somewhere in this area, Mel said, running his hand over the chart. We know she surely struck the outer reef, which tore out her bottom, but we don’t know exactly which part of the reef she struck. And even though we know the general direction the storm carried her, that she was being pushed slightly to the northwest, all we know for certain is what the artifacts have told us—the Atocha’s anchor, all of them pieces of eight from an area we call ‘The Bank of Spain,’ stuff like that. Other than that, there’s the information the Spanish handed down when they went looking for her and the Margarita."

Mathewson, noticing my obvious confusion, picked up the story at this point. The Spanish were brilliant when it came to salvaging their ships, he said, seldom leaving a stone unturned at depths up to 70 feet. In the case of the Atocha and the Margarita, however, never had salvage been of such paramount importance, for when they sank, so plummeted the fortunes of Spain. Spain’s power came at the point of a sword and from the mouth of a cannon. It was continually at war, and the gold and silver pillaged from the New World was the only way to keep the war machine running. Spain desperately needed to recover the Margarita’s and Atocha’s riches.

"The Atocha manifest says she was carrying something like 40 tons of silver and 160 boxes of gold—bars, bracelets, stuff like that, Mel chimed in with a magnanimous grin. He let that thought dangle for a few moments, then said, We’re looking at something like $400 million in treasure on her alone. Any day now we’ll be bringing it to the surface. Today’s the day."

Mathewson said he might as well start at the beginning. I glanced at Mel, who smiled and winked at me.

King Philip IV was his name, Mathewson said. Philip was only 16, a little headstrong and not overly bright. In 1621, when his dad died, Philip inherited a kingdom that stretched from the Philippines to the New World. Just like Great Britain two centuries later, the sun never set on the Spanish Empire, due in large part to its concept of diplomacy: Invade and conquer, then systematically pillage those stomped beneath their boots. Naturally, transporting the treasure back home to Spain was somewhat of a problem. Then again, the Spanish were the greatest seamen of their day, and their warships, the multigunned galleons, pretty much ruled the waves.

In concept, the Atocha was such a galleon. Built in 1620, the three-masted ship sported 20 cannons and was capable of displacing 400 tons of cargo. She proved to have been shoddily constructed, however. To meet the King’s deadline, the vessel was completed in haste. Not only were the ship’s deck timbers not secured by nails, but also the number of spikes in crucial joists was reduced from five to two. She developed leaks in her bow during her maiden voyage. But when she set sail for Seville with the Margarita and the 26 other ships of the fleet on Sunday, September 4, 1622, six weeks behind schedule—a delay that had pushed her sailing into the heart of hurricane season—the Atocha was deemed capable of withstanding anything nature could offer.

But then Spanish bureaucrats compounded her structural problems with greed, grossly overloading the grand vessel. Besides the normal abundance of cargo, 15 tons of Cuban copper and 12 tons of royal tobacco, the greater part of the Atocha’s hold was filled with 40 troy tons of registered treasure: 1,235 silver ingots, 250,000 silver coins, and 161 pieces of gold in various bars and discs. This recorded wealth does not include the scores of boxes of personal riches from the 48 passengers, 38 of whom were considered royalty. In addition, friars had 35 boxes of unrecorded wealth loaded aboard the ship, all of which was earmarked for the Catholic Church. Because the Spanish were notorious smugglers, historians estimate that an additional seven troy tons of treasure were secreted aboard the vessel.

The Margarita was also heavily laden with riches. She carried in her hold 419 silver ingots weighing 80 pounds each; 118,000 silver coins; and 1,488 ounces of gold fashioned into 34 bars and discs, plus unknown amounts of smuggled gold, silver, and emeralds.

So the Atocha and the 630-ton Margarita were absurdly overcrowded with passengers, crew, and cargo. Aggravating the situation was the way weather was forecasted in those days. Saturday, September 3, dawned clear and sunny, with favorable winds. Because there was no visible threat of encroaching storms, and because Sunday would be the conjoining of the sun and moon—interpreted to mean that these advantageous sailing conditions would last for at least three days, more than enough time for them to skirt the treacherous Florida coast and successfully ride the Gulf Stream toward hearth and home—anchors were hoisted and the fleet set sail for Spain.

A hurricane with gale force winds out of the northeast slammed into the fleet at midafternoon on Monday, churning the surface of the Gulf Stream and turning it into a seascape of 15-feet-high waves. Next came the rain, a torrent carried on a wind that pelted the ships unmercifully. And then, just when passengers and crew thought conditions could get no worse, the sky turned black as the hurricane bore down on them. Soon all 28 ships of Spain’s Tierra Firme fleet became isolated, each struggling as best it could for survival.

As the hurricane smashed through the narrow corridor separating Cuba from the Florida Keys, the tail-end galleons of the fleet—the Santa Margarita and the Nuestra Señora de Atocha—bore the brunt of the storm. For most of their combined 476 sailors, soldiers, and crew, death was less than 12 hours away.

Aboard the Atocha, sailors lashed themselves to anything solid, while others scrambled aloft to secure the sails of the foremast in an attempt to keep the ship’s stern to